Choosing an airline

Increasingly, passengers are turning to social media. “Has anyone flown China Southern via Guangzhou?” on Facebook. “Etihad or Singapore Airlines to Europe?” on Twitter. Pictures on Pinterest and Instagram, videos on Instagram and Vine. They’re a lot more realistic than airline PR snaps Photoshopped to within a pixel of their lives.

Personal experiences are crucial too: knowing that Aunt Raelene (who’s shorter than you) found the seats cramped — and seeing her knees pressed up against the seatback in front of her — will be more useful than seeing a few extras from The Hobbit stretching out on a carrier’s website as if their 31″ pitch seat were a king-size hotel bed.

The delicious three-course dinner (or lone weaponised croissant for breakfast) picky eater Cousin Lee had in economy, Uncle Frank’s glass of bubbly on boarding in premium economy, legroom shots in business and the entire first class experience — it’s all being Instagrammed, Facebooked and Tweeted by people you know, and who you are likely to trust.

The oft-quoted social circle of 150 is now an order of magnitude greater for most people and for travellers with well-connected friends it’s likely to be even more than that. It’s commonplace for a question asking for a specific answer to be retweeted and shared to thousands of people. Didn’t your book group member Pat fly on that airline? And didn’t Pat say nice things about the legroom?

Every aspect of the passenger experience is revealed to flyers as never before. What TripAdvisor did for hotels, social media is doing for airlines, but more specifically and with a greater level of trust.

Want to see what any airline looks like from the inside, from Air Arabia to Air Zimbabwe? A 10-second Instagram or Google Image Search will give you more of an idea than many travel agents would have been able to provide just a few years ago. Bloggers and forums give a seasoned (if often jaded or cliquey) view of how airlines match up against each other. And a friend, family member or colleague’s latest holiday or business trip is information that people can really relate to. What’s that, boss? That lounge was full of screaming infants? I’ll fly someone else.

Hashtags on social media are also revelatory: compare #qantas vs #virginaustralia, #787 vs #a380, and more, with images, text and opinions.

Oddly, most airlines haven’t realised that they hold an invaluable set of cards in showing passengers exactly what they’ll find on board. The variety of onboard hard product — let alone soft product, because who knows exactly when you’ll get dinner or a washbag — is mystifying for most flyers.

Airlines know which of their aircraft they plan to operate on the route. It doesn’t seem too much to ask for an airline to display which version of their seats might be on offer on which flight, or to offer interior shots of the cabins that passengers are considering. (Cabin consistency, a previous topic in this column, need not be a prerequisite: “You’ll either have A or B” is better than not knowing at all.)

The thing is, most passengers don’t know how to find full-flat rather than angle-flat seats in business or have an understanding of what a seat pitch of 31″ vs 34″ means in the real world. And seat layout is almost uniformly opaque, yet an economy 2-3-2 layout on a 767 compared with a 3-4-3 configuration on a 777 are light-years apart.

Setting expectations and meeting or exceeding them should be part of an airline’s goals as much as it is for any business. If TV ads show business class passengers reclining on beds twice their size, with plump duvets and enormous squashy pillows, travellers have a reasonable expectation that their flight might involve a similar amount of luxury. Yet on board, real-world passenger-to-seat proportions won’t be the same even if the actual seats are as advertised.

For most passengers, it’s a case of caveat emptor. But for airlines, caveat vendor should be the watchword. The first carrier to win the honesty in onboard offering stakes will also win kudos and loyalty from passengers fed up of being sold a bill of goods.